Month: August 2017

Trading Returns and Performance

July 2017 was a great month for my trading performance. Here is a table which shows the trading returns over the last nine months.

Table of Returns for different time periods

As can be seen, my trading activity gave a return of 59% in July 2016 alone. This was in conjunction with a rise in the bank nifty of 8.15%. However, as I kept withdrawing capital from trading and deploying it in debt, I am not clear as to what the trading capital showed be considered. In any case, trading activity for me is a business which created income, not a wealth generating activity. Hopefully, wealth will get generated through my debt, equity and real estate portfolio. So I am far more interested in the absolute returns from my trading activity.

This month, I also started trading commodities in earnest. The total capital set aside for commodities is still a fraction of the total for the Bank Nifty. Hopefully, over a period of time, this shall rise.

Currently, I am trading Crude/Natural Gas, Gold/Silver, Zinc/Copper. I feel that trading a basket of instruments shall improve the stability of my trading performance. However, I am still not confident of increasing the position size of the commodity basket. Over a period of time, I shall slowly increase this.

Below is my trading equity curve till July 2017.

Trading Equity Line for the last nine months (Normalized to an arbitrary base)

What about drawdown? Well, in July 2016, there were several days where the trading equity was at the maximum, and there was no drawdown at all.

Here is the drawdown:

Trading Drawdown Curve (Normalized to an arbitrary figure)

All in all, a very satisfying performance in trading activity in July 2017.

Investment Performance in terms of returns

Below is a graphical representation of my investing performance upto July 2017. Further below is a table of returns.

My investing performance relative to other benchmarks

First, some housekeeping. You will notice that this graph is different from earlier ones, where I had also mentioned my trading performance. The reason for this change is simple. The trading performance in July was simply crazy. So if this line is also added to the above graph, then the range on the axis changes in such a manner that there is no possibility of distinguishing between the various investment benchmarks. In addition, there is difficulty in understanding what the exact trading capital is. As a result, it is best to look at trading and investing performance separately, and maybe, once a year or so, revisit a comparison. In any case, below, I also present a table which details the returns on trading along with investing benchmarks.

As can be seen from the graph above, and the table below, the trend established earlier still continues. The mutual funds outperform my investment performance, which outperforms the PMS schemes from Motilal Oswal and Centrum. All of them outperform index benchmarks, except the Bank Nifty Index.

My investment performance continues to be marred by underperformance of my biggest holdings-IDFC, IDFC Bank and Oberoi Realty. On the other hand, Bajaj Finserv continues to outperform, as to other stocks like Indiabulls Housing Finance.

In July, I also converted about 4% of my portfolio to cash. I also made a concerted effort to pare down the number of stocks in my portfolio (from around 100 to around 75). I will continue this exercise of bringing down the portfolio size to around 30-40 stocks over the next one year. Among my larger holdings, I have completely exited Muthoot Capital Services (and have partially switched to Muthoot Finance), Munjal Auto (and partially added to Munjal Showa), Alkyl Amines and Bayer Cropsciences (and have partially switched to PI Industries and also added Tata Chemicals). I have further exited IL & FS Investment Managers. I have also exited Tata Steel (and switched to Vedanta and Tata Investment Corportation). I have exited Sobha Developers and added to NESCO. I have exited Vardhman Acrylics and added to Vardhman Textiles. I have also exited JP infratech and JP Power and added to Jain Irrigation. I have further added to IRB infra and Pokarna. I continue to slowly accumulate Pharma Stocks (Sun and Dr Reddy’s). I have completely exited my small positions in Hindalco, EIH, IL&FS Transportation Networks, Federal Bank, Laxmi Vilas Bank. Finally, I have finally exited MPS ( a large holding) and added to EClerx.

All of these switches have been done more to reduce the number of stocks I want to track, than any fundamental reasons. In some instances (like MPS), I did not like the business prospects. In some cases (Bayer or Munjal Auto), I just felt that the price had run ahead of the business.

Here is a table of my investment returns compared with various other benchmarks.